a freezing fog’s descended on london town making the more salubrious areas looks suitably dickensian just in time for the crackling fireplaces of the ancestral living room to begin their festive clarion call.
having made an executive decision to take a day’s holiday pre-holiday just, you know, to make sure we’re relaxed enough for the upcoming break, i figured i’d spend this last hour shackled to my paying keyboard pre-empting what might be a fallow period for these here horse latitudes…
and totting up my super6 bringers of great joy and gladness for double Oh-6.
1) horse latitudes - finally, an outlet for my incessant cod philosophical muso musings. shared, of course, with two of the finest minds of my generation and committed to bringing you the bestest thing since the last best thing we brought you.
2) j.tillman records - i might have to self-edit my tillmania for the whole of january just so you don’t get bored but if you’ve not bought minor works for someone in your immediate family this christmas then they will be terribly disappointed.
3) high heels - making me nearly six foot, causing blisters galore and forcing a strut like a peacock but i never really wore them before and now i love them probably a little bit too much.
4) the beast’s blow-outs - laying down some serious cooking time dans la cuisine i’ve made some killer food this year and best of all shared it with more than appreciative audiences - all that and i invented the 2nd best breakfast ever (raspberry french toast parcels, fried in butter and dusted with icing sugar, anyone?)
5) family - mine and other people’s, officially and unofficially, related or just on the same plain (man)… this year’s been all about growing/adopting/appropriating/rediscovering amazing families all over the place.
6) right back atcha.
to round off, my contribution to the christmas track paean is by sufjan stevens, from his much blogged/touted christmas box set but it also happens to be one of my tracks of the year.
There are zillions of ‘end of year’ best of lists flying around at the moment.
We had a little talk about it here ,at horse latitude mansions, but decided we didn’t really want to do a top ten albums, cause we can’t honestly say that is how we listen to music anymore.
So perhaps a top five tracks then….
….well maybe later, right now here is a list of 6 (for 06) things I fell in love with. Things that may have been around for ages, but, after coming across, in 2006, I can no longer imagine life without them.
1) 5ep jeans (bought them on a whim in january and have worn them at least 300 days this year ,which is probably a bit skanky ,but they are so beautifully made and for the first two weeks they made me feel like king everytime I put them on)
2)The Road by Cormac McCarthy (bleak yet uplifting, lean and poetic-a bit like me then except for the bleak bit…and not so much the poetic or lean bits either)
3)The Children Of Men-the best film of the year (I could barely get on the tube afterwards and was positively weeping at the denouement-heavy cinema)
4)Entourage-I’ve been pinning after ari and the boys ever since I blew my bitorrent wad a little too quickly by blitzing season three in the Autumn, it’s back on early next year-this dude, for one, can’t freakin wait.
5)’PAUL’ chocolate and almond croisssant with a ‘Monmouth coffee’ cappuccino-now thats a mother freakin’ take-out breakfast.
6)I’ll have to tell that to you in person.
… and for once my crushing fangirl tendancies our critical weight and invaluable support for talented but woefully under exposed artists are reciprocated.
j. tillman who, you’ll remember we think is alarmingly ace, pulled himself away from the dancing girls with ostrich feathers round la pigalle when he was holed up in paris last week to answer our questions…
hl: yo, jt…how and where are you?
jt: i’m in paris for the week just recouperating and enjoying not being in transit.
hl:we here at hl all have day jobs which afford us time and some funds to persue our creative exploits, what’s your playing music/getting paid balance like?
jt: the balance is that i go on tour and go into debt and then try to catch up when i’m home at my job. one of which i don’t currently have. so, maybe “balance” isn’t exactly the right word. more like “playing music/poor financial decisions”. a lot of the misconceptions people in this industry have regarding the financial needs of artists are just that, but more often than that it’s just plain robbery.
hl: do you find it weird when people badger you with gushing praise at your myspace page/website/gigs?
jt: well, there is a distinction between the kind of praise that gushes and the kind of praise that has substance and is necessary for keeping morale up on the road. but when people tell me things like “your voice is like audio butterfly kisses” then, yeah, i tend to run screaming for the door. europeans are actually pretty good about letting you know what they don’t like about your music. as in “your songs all sound the same” or “you’re not as good as jeff tweedy”.
hl: ok, so you wrote, sung, played on, arranged, produced and even did the art direction for minor works and you write and record most all the time… do you have a new disque waiting to greet us in 2007, and will it be so hands on?
jt: i always have an ideal pretty early on for how i want to go about a record, but financial/time limitations usually force me to find other ways to go about it, which can ultimately make the record more interesting. so i won’t really know until i get closer to when i have the resources to record. i have two albums worth of material ready to go for 2007, but it all depends.
hl: you’re my favourite internet derived musical trove of 2006 - who’s yours?
jt: i don’t have a computer at home so i’m usually in cafes, etc. when i check email so i can’t say i’ve really listened to much music online this year. my favorite artists that i heard this year was a guy named teitur from the faroe islands that i played with in vienna.
hl: if you could’ve been the singer or drummer in any band apart from the one’s you’re currently in (and have been in) who’d it be?
jt: either otis redding or bill withers. casey foubert, formerly of the crystal skulls, is the best drummer i know and effortlessly cool as hell to boot, so i’d be him.
hl: do you really not like iron and wine’s sam beam? is it a beard envy thing? (but damn ‘cryin’ and whine’ is really freaking funny)*
jt: i was just giving a silly answer to a silly question, i think his music is really vital and it’s incredible that there’s a record buying public out there willing to make a record as raw as “creek drank” a commercial sucess. have you seen my beard recently? it’s pretty burly.
hl: if you were 25 years older and scorsese/robbie robertson call you up to be in the last waltz who would you have gone on with and which song would you’ve been on?
jt: doing inebriated jump kicks in a sequened jump suit with van morrison has always been a real dream of mine.
hl: sooo, imagine its summer; the sun’s shining, beer’s been sunk under the canopy of a spreading oak tree in a park somewhere and damien jurado (the band) are about to play dolorean at baseball - when the teams are picked who’s are you gonna end up on and who’d be the star player?**
jt: oh, team jurado would definately need an ex-varsity sportsmen like myself to make the game anywhere near even. al james’s nickname is “coach thunder” (i’m not kidding) so you can see my point. i could see ben nugent (their drummer) taking home the MVP. he’s the kind of dude who checks game stats on his cellphone.
hl: its nearly Christmas, what do you most want to find under your tree on the 25th?
jt: a mattress.
hl: is there a question you wish people would ask you, so can nochalantly drop a premo fact/self agrandisment in without forcing it and looking like a bit of a tit?
jt: i just love talking about myself so much that any question even remotely tillman-centic is inevitably the most fascinating question i’ve ever heard.
hl: you’re coming back to the uk in the spring for some more dates, wanna hang out then?
jt: yes.
so there we have it. josh tillman is funny, talented and wants to be our friend***
*yuk, don’t you just hate insider jokes? see here for the context to that one
** as well as touring/hanging out with/doing laundry for damien jurado (the band) j.tillman also toured with the similarly brilliant seattle outfit dolorean. more about them another time, this here is tillman time.
Too many things to do and not enough time/cash to do them how I’d like. Also djing this time of year is generally not so great-those chi-chi little bars I play have been invaded by maurading office parties and the usually less than polite punter/deejay superstar interactions have plummetted to new depths of rudeness.
Anyway enough of my scroogness, it’s a shame that this time of year we all get overcome by this collective mania an don’t spend our time and energy on the really important stuff (like getting down to golden age xmas hiphop anthems)
Here is Run DMC’s enormous ‘Christmas in Hollis’ to restore your seasonal feelings of joy and good will to all men. It’s just about the only christmas track in my collection (spector aside- natch) that really does it for me.
last time i posted, i mentioned my propensity for a bit of slighty cheesy r’n'b.
well, last night as i was hand printing my christmas cards (never a dull night chez moi) i was running through some potential selections for the best horse latitudes mixtape ever ™
(erm, not that its a competition boys…)
and for reasons best known to me, d’angelo’s 2003 ‘feel like makin’ love’ was soundtrack to my festive exploits and damn, if there’s a type of music its a uniquely solitary experience to listen to on your own, its that kind of soul.
so there i was, in the middle of a minor production line, my dad’s old shirt worn back to front (proper craft styles), sleeves rolled up and all i could do was think about *someone*
(and not in a filthy way)
but it struck me that if ever there was a track made for two people, but to be listened to by one, that might be it.
foggy memories, hazy promises and sleepy futures.
major props go to one james yancey for the frankly sublime jazz trumpet, a squelching, bubbling wah, and all that lean-back-hand-clap head bobbing joy, coupled with d’angelo’s laconic, slow-steady-hands-under-the-covers vocal… this wrings all of the wrigley’s ad, cali-rock from bad company’s orginal and sets it on a path all it’s own.
so *leans closer into the mic* here’s a something for the weekend for all you lovers out there…
When I got to art college I was lucky enough to fall in with some like minded muso dudes. ‘Stevie B’ Bruno, Joe ‘Baron Samedi’ Lashbrook, Farooq ‘Faz’ Khan and I formed a heavy beats and smokes ‘collective’ named ‘Voodoo’, spending days and weeks planning our schemes for world domination. Cut off from the entire cultural world in leafy surrey we obsessed endlessly over gilles & norman’s radio shows and over music mags like Straight no Chaser, rigorously compilling epic ‘want’ lists. Such was the power of our nascient musical fervour that we would literally be running to Universal Sounds/Mr Bongos/the basement of Daddy Kool on our monthly record buying visits. Of course none of the records we wanted were available- all floating seductively out of reach in the ether of exclusive promoes and cdrs.
One of these unreachable tracks was the by a guy called dj shadow. Leaking from the jazz pages, hype about a track called influx had started to penetrate more traditional music press. It was nowhere to be found (of course) but this track was. Pre-dating the influx 12″ by a few months and trickling to London on import I picked it up in blackmarket or somewhere similarly off the beaten path for mowax beat junkies.
Coming back home to the Third Floor in the holidays I would be armed with stacks of vinyl goodness (and eventually my own 1210s), like this. Of course I had no idea that DJ shadow would eventually be a big deal. Listening to it with my bro, all we could muster by way of critical appraisal was ‘damn those drums sound amazing !’
technically, the answer is the sister of filthy whiteboy hiphop guttersnipe, black nasty. but like all things in this crazy world of ours there’s more than one response to that question.
pink nasty is a purveyor of texan musical loveliness and celestial vocal musings, who i first encountered when i heard her new album, mold the gold, was produced by palace brother and real-life sibling of beloved bonnie ‘prince’ billy, paul oldham.
and not only that, they’d recorded a lovers duet (in the time honoured tradition of say, mickey and sylvia, only in denim dungarees). now, anything with will oldham on is more than enough to pique my interest, so i tracked down ‘Don’t Ever Change’ with every hunting instinct in my body and dag-namint if i didn’t love it so.
couple that kind of box-ticking with my burgeoning cover version habit and throw in a the dirty soft spot i have for cheesy r’n'b and strike me down if pink nasty don’t floor me with this.
yes, it might be the first use of the use of the word ‘boo’ in the country oeuvre.
and yes, yes, yes she maintain’s the lyric “all my fella’s can you feel my pain?’ but this is what cover versions were destined to do, make you hear a song in a new way (and you don’t have to suffer usher’s nearly insufferable cocksurity and frugdancing).
having already, more than a few times, established my propensity for heavy use of the repeat button on my ipod/itunes it’ll come as the least surprising surprise this side of Christmas that this track accompanied me all the way down the jamaica road on sunday (since you didn’t ask, that’s five consecutive plays between london bridge and canada water).
This is part two of my ‘Prince monlogues’ (the first part is here) which I have written in response to a fleeting enquiry by fellow hl’er jez, so you can blame him when you’re all Prince’d out.
Coming right at the end of the 82-88 golden era (and maybe further evidence of the increasing artistic insecurity), The Black Album was withdrawn just as it reached stores. Prince decided that it was just too negative and that if he were to die suddenly in the following years, it was not how he would want to be remembered. It is also Prince at his darkest and funkiest, a return to the rougher, dirtier pre-Purple Rain sound and is the era that seems most referenced by contemporary artists such as moodymann.
I picked up my copy (on tape) from the bootleg stall in Camden Market when you could still get all sorts of illegal delights from there (happy days indeed).
Here is a track from the album, Bob George, which is a bit of a family obsession, so there is bound to be a 12 minute jaksoul/quaid edit at some point. It’s simple heavy electronic funk. Prince has some weird voice fx and takes the role of some pimped out alter-ego, it’s not a love song and is in many ways the antithesis of the previously posted track ‘Adore’, which maybe says something about how far his music had changed within the space of a year.
another week nearly over, and despite much self-inflicted, tiredness-enduced angst and illness its been another doozy; what with the basilika boys spreading rhythm so infectious on saturday the punters plain couldn’t help themselves, some quality r’n'r (just don’t ask what the ‘r’ stands for), hook ups with old but fun connections, seeing ms coco electrik strut her foxiest, hotpant, jumpsuited stuff at the acoustic ladyland album launch on tuesday and generally whooping it up round london town. but goodness me if it isn’t friday all over again and my turn to ease you into le weekend with something to raise your heart rate and shake your ass.
courtesy of melting pot music, this is a live (yes, yes, y’all!) cover of afrikaa bambaataa and the soul sonic force’s seminal electro/hiphop classic, planet rock, brought to you with the teutonic stylings of Breakout.
this is ripped from the vinyl so you even get that authentic click and rustle of the stylus hitting before the killer drum kicks its way into your chest cavity and makes you jack like you probably shouldn’t in public…
this is way more information than any of you need, but it makes me dance round my bedroom in nothing but a towel like i’m molly ringwald and it’s 1986.
there’s few words that’ll make feel like ‘homemade’ does.
i’m a real sucker for it.
maybe its an identification thing. i spend quite a lot of time making stuff; knitting scarves, baking, hand making cards, trying to build stuff, making music.
and there’s the weight of history in homemade, the perpetuation of a folk lore and long honed knowledge. there’s something in home made which speaks of innocence and experience, self reliance and attention to detail - which might all be the words i’d circle on a psychometric test if i thought no one was going to read it after.
so when i fell in love with this track, it was before i found out that the lovely alela diane (major props for the palindromic first name, i’m transfixed by it) handmade the initial 650 copy run of her album Pirate’s Gospel, by sewing lace onto the brown paper covers, hand painting the galleons and doing the typeface, in fact she even apologises for having to have them mass produced “i wish that my hands were strong enough to make everything on my own, but it was no longer possible to make as many cds as I needed. I will continue to make things… like t-shirts and special edition cds that will be available at shows.”
there are so many thing to love about this song and alela’s approach and aesthetic i’m not even sure whether i should like her or just plain envy her (but i’m nice so i’ll like her). the pirate’s gospel sways its way into your heart, in that way that song’s you feel you’ve somehow always known do .
and there’s something about the spirit of this song which is so rooted in a hearty, honest, joyful and appropriate praise which is so very gospel to the core.
so put on your eye patch, and befriend a parrot, for all that three ships wants to be but can’t owing to a lack of impetus, time and probably talent, i give you… the pirate’s gospel
